Anti-fracking environmental groups including some involved in Colorado protests are getting millions in funding from a Bermuda firm with ties to – wait for it – Russian “oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.”

Markay’s exhaustive report details how the money scheme has funneled funding in recent years to Fractivist groups like Food and Water Watch, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters and the Center for American Progress.

With oil prices plunging as a result of a fracking-induced oil glut in the United States, experts say the links between Russian oil interests, secretive foreign political donors, and high-profile American environmentalists suggest Russia may be backing anti-fracking efforts in the United States.

The report goes on to describe key officials inside the shadowy Bermudan company:

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy.

The news report was sent to us by an alert reader, who made the obvious connection to anti-fracking activities in Colorado by out-of-country state environmentalists, like Food and Water Watch.

Most recently, we saw Weld County Jefferson High students, who were supposed to be on a learning field trip, protesting at the recent oil and gas task force meeting while holding anti-fracking signs.

This message brought to you by Mother Russia.

Note the wording along the bottom of the signs that shows the glaring link to Food and Water Watch.

We also told you last year that Food and Water Watch was heavily involved in so-called local initiatives to ban fracking, describing them as a “national wolf among the local-coalition sheep.”

Turns out the wolves were of the international variety, loyal only to the oil produced by Mother Russia.

Proletarii vsex stran, soedinyajtes’!

Remember the failed attempt to ban fracking in Loveland? And the so-called citizens’ anti-fracking initiatives in Boulder, Broomfield and Fort Collins? Food and Water Watch along with the Sierra Club were among those pouring in shady resources.

Frack Free Colorado, a group created by Food & Water Watch and other East Coast “ban fracking” organizations, is turning out activists to campaign against oil and gas development in Erie.

It has been suspected for several years that Russian oil interests were behind anti-fracking efforts in the U.S.; still we were a little surprised to see it so clearly, and finally linked in Markay’s reporting. It’s must read journalism.

Now it’s up to Congress to investigate this corruptive influence on American policy and politics. And although Greenies insist that their funding sources remain top secret, when that money is linked to foreign donors, the jig is up.

The revelation that Jefferson High students were unwittingly part of that scheme is also extremely disconcerting.

And, we’re still waiting on that report from school officials to explain how their students, during school hours, were roped into becoming foreign and domestic political pawns.